The bomb symbol first appeared on the original Macintosh in 1984. Often, a reason for the crash including the error code was displayed in the dialog. If a person was lucky, a "Resume" button would be an option, which could be used to dismiss the dialog and force the offending program to quit, but most often the resume button would be grayed out and the computer would have to be restarted. Originally, the resume button was unavailable unless the running program had provided the OS with code to allow recovery by passing a resume procedure to InitDialogs. With the advent of System 7, if the OS thought it could handle recovery, a normal error dialog box was displayed, and the application was forced to quit. That was helped by the classic Mac OS providing a little bit of protection against heap corruption using heap zones; if the application was to crash and the application's heap was corrupt, it could be thrown away.

The debugger program MacsBug was sometimes used even by end users to provide basic (though not always reliable) error recovery, and could be used for troubleshooting purposes much as the output of a Unixkernel panic or a Windows NTBlue Screen of Death could be. Mac OS Classic bomb boxes were often ridiculed for providing little or no useful information about the error; this was a conscious decision by the Macintosh team to eliminate any information that the end user could not make sense of.

In Mac OS X, the system architecture is vastly different from that in the classic Mac OS, and an application crash can not usually bring down the entire system. A kernel panic screen (either text overwritten on the screen in older versions, or simplified to a reboot message in more recent versions) replaces the bomb symbol but appears less often due to the radically different system architecture. The bomb symbol is not used in Mac OS X.

In the original Mac OS, the operating system call to display a "bomb box" was named DSError, and the corresponding alert table information was stored in resources of type 'DSAT'. "DS" stood first for "Deep Shit", as in the "Deep Shit Manager," and later for "Dire Straits". For documentation purposes, this was renamed the 'System Error Manager.'[1]

Atari ST TOS

This is a screenshot from an (emulated) Atari ST, the four bombs indicate that the system error "Illegal Instruction" has occurred.

Lettris is a curious tetris-clone game where all the bricks have the same square shape but different content. Each square carries a letter. To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares.

boggle

Boggle gives you 3 minutes to find as many words (3 letters or more) as you can in a grid of 16 letters. You can also try the grid of 16 letters. Letters must be adjacent and longer words score better. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame !

English dictionary Main references

Most English definitions are provided by WordNet .
English thesaurus is mainly derived from The Integral Dictionary (TID).
English Encyclopedia is licensed by Wikipedia (GNU).